Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bellcore!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!exodus!exodus-bb!khb From: khb@chiba.Eng.Sun.COM (Keith Bierman fpgroup) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Alignment on RS/6000 Message-ID: Date: 21 Nov 90 20:21:49 GMT References: <893@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> Sender: news@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM Organization: Sun MegaSystems Lines: 26 In-reply-to: ian@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ's message of 21 Nov 90 00:16:33 GMT In article <893@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ> ian@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ (Ian Dall) writes: In a similar vein, how many people have been caught by a floating point program taking "forever" on a sparc (no doubt othe machines as well) because it was spending all it's time doing NaN and Inf exception handling? Only underflow costs a lot. I know the handling of these faults can be changed, but the point is that the result takes *so* much longer to calculate as to be useless. Much better to make the default to core dump on a floating point exception. Well, there is compliance with the word and spirit of IEEE 754 to consider. Since there are enough folks who disagree with the committee, current compilers (C1.0, f77v1.3, etc.) allow one to compile -fnonstd to get that behavior. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------- Keith H. Bierman kbierman@Eng.Sun.COM | khb@chiba.Eng.Sun.COM SMI 2550 Garcia 12-33 | (415 336 2648) Mountain View, CA 94043